Some PayPal transactions require more than one buyer-and-seller pair. For example, parallel payment calls and Adaptive calls each require two different business accounts but for different reasons. In these cases, you must create additional sandbox business accounts to play the roles of the entities in your transactions.

Create a personal sandbox account

Create a personal sandbox account to represent the buyer in a transaction. The PayPal sandbox automatically creates your first personal sandbox account when you sign up for a developer account on the developer site. To generate the personal sandbox account name, PayPal appends -buyer to your email address.

When you create a sandbox account, you assign an email address and password to it. You use the email address to reference the sandbox account in your test API calls. You also use the email and password values to log in to the sandbox accounts page to view and configure the sandbox account.

Tip: To simplify the testing process, use the same password for all your sandbox accounts.

Create a business sandbox account

The PayPal sandbox automatically creates your first business sandbox account when you sign up for a developer account on the developer site. To generate the account name, PayPal appends -facilitator to your email name. PayPal assigns a set of NVP/SOAP test API credentials to the account. Use the account to create mock PayPal transactions in the PayPal sandbox.

Note: If your sandbox account is already linked to another developer account, you cannot link it to your developer account.

Duplicate a sandbox account

If you have an existing Business or Personal test account, you can clone that account to create a new account of the same type. This can be helpful if you're trying to model several merchants or customers that have slightly varying properties. By creating multiple sandbox accounts, you can test various payment flows and error scenarios.

When you clone a sandbox account, PayPal automatically copies the account type (Business or Personal), PayPal balance, first name, and last name of the original account to the new account. PayPal creates an email address for the account by appending -1 to the original email address. If you clone the same account again, PayPal follows the same pattern and increments the ID. A second cloned account appends -2 to the email address.

After you clone an account, you can edit the PayPal balance, first name, last name, and email address. You must also set a password for the new account, the password is not cloned.

To duplicate a sandbox account:

Log in to the Developer Dashboard and navigate to the Sandbox Accounts section of the Sandbox > Accounts page to view your existing sandbox accounts.

For each account you want to duplicate, press the manage account button on the far right side of the sandbox accounts table and select Duplicate Account.

Edit any fields you want to modify, supply payment information, and click Create Account to complete the process.

Note: When you duplicate a sandbox account, the Pro status is disabled by default and any flags that have been set up by your Account Manager are not duplicated to the new account.

Some sandbox accounts have cloning disabled for the following reasons:

Test account is still in the creation process.

The test account partially or completely failed on the back-end during the creation process and such accounts cannot be cloned.